Skateboards to EVs: Hyundai taps Canoo for cost reduction

Hyundai has tapped California start-up Canoo for a huge and possibly game-changing electric vehicle partnership, which will see the motor group try to capitalize on a skateboard-style platform to house a range of low-cost electric and purpose-built vehicles. Canoo will provide the engineering expertise around its skateboard architecture (see image). The platform houses pretty much all of the critical operating components of the vehicle, including the battery, leaf spring suspension, steer-by-wire mechanism and even its climate control. This isn’t a particularly new style of approach, but Hyundai has stated that the fact that each ‘skateboard unit’ is essentially self-contained means that it expects the system to allow for a “simplified and standardized development process, lowering vehicle price,” which will be…